News Media

Facebook’s India arm reportedly made Rs 177 crs revenue in FY16, the last year for which it reported revenues. In the same period, Google India made Rs 5,904 crs. Google is thus about 33x Facebook revenues in India.

For the year-ending Mar’17 we will very likely see a lower multiple, for Google may not grow as much as Facebook in India, given its higher base. Let us assume …

In 2017, Group M, a leading media agency, estimates that we will see marketing expenditures cross the $1 trillion threshold for the first time ever. This includes about ~$550b of advertising expenditure or ‘Above The Line’ i.e., print, TV, digital, radio, OOH etc., and balance ~$450b in marketing services, primarily ‘Below The Line’ spends e.g., direct marketing, events, activations such as tasting sessions within a mall as well as buying …

Mint, a financial daily from HT Media Group, went from a Berliner to the larger Broadsheet format today.

Mint’s front cover in broadsheet format 12 Sep ’16

Why did they do this?

Mint’s Executive Editor R Sukumar explained the change here. In the article he cites only one reason; that the earlier Berliner format was better suited to carrying longer in depth investigative pieces (“more of less” as he …

Twitter recently announced its Q1 2016 results. While its revenue grew by 36% to ~$600m, and losses halved to ~$80m, the numbers didn’t impress Wall Street analysts or tech pundits. After all, revenue growth is slowing, audience numbers are barely moving and there are newer more exciting kids (snapchat, medium etc) on the block. The stock dropped as much as 13% on the news, and is now trading at its …

Let’s face it: 2015 wasn’t really a great year for media companies. From television majors that saw cord-cutting making a sharp dent in their valuations to online players that saw the looming threat from ad-blocking impacting the flow of advertising dollars, there hasn’t been too much good news this year.

And if we take news media – the smaller subset of the media industry that we call home – then …

The bundle, as seen for magazines and newspapers, was designed keeping in mind, a dual-revenue stream, one, albeit larger from ads and the other from readers. In the case of newspapers, the bundle also presumed some degree of exclusivity of readership (read monopoly) and thereby the need to cater to a wide range of customers.

I have a colleague who uses twitter in the most peculiar way. He only tweets @-replies to brands with whom he has a service grouse, in an attempt to get them to respond faster. He has pioneered an interesting use case for twitter as a ‘public’ email service.

Twitter as a ‘Public’ Email Service

This is not something that could have been visualized by anyone at twitter when it was …

One little-known fact about Silicon Valley darlings Uber and Airbnb (and many others) for lay folks is how little of the underlying tech platform they directly control, and how much is really hacked together cleverly using public APIs (application programme interface).

I love Monday Note. It is one of my favourite media + tech blogs (along with Benedict Evans and Stratechery). I like it so much that I even adopted the wordpress theme that they use, for this blog. Imagine my disappointment then, when I came across their recent article on Monday Note – lamenting LinkedIn’s failure to become a publishing major domo. The article clearly missed a few …

As you would all know by now, Pearson sold the FT Group yesterday to Nikkei for US$1.3b. The FT Group includes FT, some magazines such as Banker, Investor’s Chronicle, a 50% stake in Russian Biz Paper Vedomosti, an-EIU type co called Medley Global Advisors etc.

The valuation, at ~35X the adjusted operating income of $37m (on rev of $559m for 2014) is amongst …